Last week, my colleagues at G2 turned communist for a day – then wrote up the results in a special issue. Not that they described it as such, those white-collar professionals with their artfully chosen casualwear and impressively-nuanced views on Cath Kidston. No, the term they used for this socio-political experiment was camping.

Yet camping and communism share more than similar Scrabble tiles – all those low-scoring Cs and Is and Ms. Consider what happens when you swap your wage-slavery for a rucksack: adult hierarchy is flattened, utensils and resources are pooled. Tasks are performed as a unit: you may lay on the food, but your friend is a better cook, and her boyfriend will clean the dishes. There is no question of people being paid differently for different tasks. Nor, on the G2 outing, did Tim Dowling claim a seven-figure "banjo bonus" for providing a highly-valued service enjoyed by less-talented souls: evidently, he needs some lessons from the nice men at Goldman Sachs.

The connections between the Great Outdoors and political utopia are memorably drawn by G A Cohen in Why Not Socialism? At one point in the book, the philosopher lists various objections that could be made to the sharing of resources. An expert fisherman on the trip might demand more perch than anyone else, for instance, or someone stumbling across an apple tree could ask for more room in the tent before she shows it to the others. In each case, Cohen argues, the answer from the other campers would be the same: "For heaven's sake, don't be such a schmuck." People might otherwise live in vastly unequal societies where they are rewarded very differently for their abilities, choices and backgrounds – but deep down everyone recognises the "moral shabbiness" of such regimes.

As a fellow at All Souls college, Oxford, the late Jerry Cohen (he died last summer, just before his essay was published) was neither expert on guy-ropes nor particularly enthusiastic about them. He was a central-heating socialist, really, who preferred his political debate indoors rather than out by the factory gates. A more outdoorsy philosopher might have acknowledged that someone will always turn up on a camping trip without all the kit, while someone else will always skive off.

Yet they would still wind up at Cohen's big question: if people choose to live like this for a few weeks each year, what's to stop them doing so all the time? After all, it's not as if camping is the only situation where the normal rules of pay-as-you-go market exchange are suspended. Libraries are also commonly funded, which means that the fan of cheap Mills & Boon novels is subsidising the student who consults an expensive encyclopedia. And others such as Richard Titmuss have written about how blood and organ donors give away these priceless possessions to people whose names they will never know.

Perhaps the attraction of these activities and institutions is that they offer a refuge from the normal capitalist grind. Certainly, the history of modern camping is the history of people who want to live differently and perhaps more dangerously than they can in big cities.

The American pioneers of camping who set off into the Adirondack wilderness were usually inspired by American Indians and came back with names such as Nessmuk or Black Wolf. And as the camping writer Matthew De Abaitua points out, British socialists took to camping in the late 19th century because they needed time and space outside the usual limits of working life to discuss politics. Indeed, the first British holiday camp was expressly socialist. Founded by John Fletcher Dodd in 1906, Caister offered communal cold showers and a wake-up call in the early hours that went: "Good morning, comrades!"

It is precisely that refuge mentality that irritated George Orwell, who thought the left should spend more time winning power and less time on what he saw as quackery. In The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell describes a bus ride through Letchworth where two old socialists boarded: "They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly you could study every dimple." It's fair to assume they were campers.

But if anything, Cohen's argument about the communality of camping is more powerful now than it would have been in the 30s. Why Not Socialism? doesn't advance an argument for a big interventionist state, but for a society of common bonds. "Mass engagement, a broad culture of responsibility, mutuality and obligation". Jerry Cohen didn't say that; David Cameron did, in last year's Hugo Young lecture – and what is on offer in the Marxist philosopher's book is almost a leftwing riposte to the Tories' Big Society spiel. Call it Big Socialism.

The greatest achievement of this little book, though, is that it flips the argument against socialism. Where the case against organising society differently often rests on its implausibility, Cohen points out that different structures and ways of dealing with each other crop up all the time.

The argument then becomes not whether to have socialism but how to have it. Or so you might feel if your own summer camping trip ends without torrential rain or glowering acrimony. Meantime, The North Face can adopt a new advertising slogan: Camping wear for the discerning vanguardiste.